Hunted (22 page)

Caroline was trying not to freak out at the dozens of pairs of tiny glowing eyes that seemed to be looking at her from everywhere when she tripped over a root and, chain rattling, grabbed Reed’s hand for balance. Glancing around at her, he closed his fingers around her hand. She was just registering how warm, strong, and really absurdly comforting his big hand wrapped around hers felt when the ringing stopped and, very faintly, she heard her father say, “Who is this?”

Just hearing his voice made her stomach twist. She was truly afraid that he was involved in the big bad, she realized, and the thought made her stomach tighten. Whatever his faults as a husband to her mother and a father to her and her sisters might have been—and they were many—she had always felt a grudging respect for his professional integrity. Despite everything, to have to question that made her feel—odd.

Issues,
she told herself.
You have issues
.

Her father sounded wary, and she guessed that whatever had come up on her phone’s digital display must have been something weird, like the number 000-000-0000. At this time of night, on this holiday, she shouldn’t be getting any calls, so her phone would have been silent until now, with Reed’s call. Even if the news of her kidnapping was all over TV, which it might or might not be, no one would be awake to see it.

“Superintendent.” Reed’s voice was hard. “I have your daughter.”

“Goddamn it, Ware, what the hell are you doing?” Martin growled. His voice sounded small and distant, but she was surprised to discover that she could hear him perfectly well. Because the path was narrow, Reed was ahead of her; joined by their linked hands, she trailed him closely. She wasn’t sure he realized that she could hear both sides of the conversation.

“What I have to. You should know by now that I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”

“Let Caroline go.” Martin said it like any concerned father would. Like her safety was his first priority.

Reed replied, “I will—when I get what I want.”

“And what’s that?”

“I want to make a trade—Caroline for Anton Bayard.”

“The little brother of that punk-ass kid you just threw your life away for?”

“I see you know who I’m talking about,” Reed said with a touch of menace.

“By now I know everything there is to know about you. I made it my business to. When one of my cops loses his mind and pulls a stunt like this, it’s a reflection on me, and on the department.” Martin’s voice, which had been rough, gentled. “Ware, you need to come on in. I’ve been talking to some doctors here and they think that the loss of your family may have triggered some kind of mental breakdown. Come in and let us help you.”

A mental breakdown triggered by the deaths of his son and ex-wife? The explanation seemed breathtakingly plausible, and for the briefest of moments Caroline was staggered by it. Could the big bad that Reed was reacting to really be all in his mind? Then she recalled Holly’s fierce insistence that “the cops” had done him and Reed wrong, and did a lightning review of every interaction she’d had with Reed since she’d arrived on scene at the Winfield mansion. Conclusion: the man was absolutely sane.

Which meant that her father was full of shit. Or maybe, the tiny little voice of that part of her that still seemed to be the superintendent’s loyal daughter suggested, maybe he was just wrong.

She found herself fiercely hoping that he was just wrong.

“Leave my family out of it.” Reed’s voice was ugly.

Martin continued without responding: “All that stuff you were talking about—those murders you thought were suspicious—I had somebody review them after you punched your way out of my office. They’re no more than ordinary street crime, Ware, and that’s the truth. I’m at headquarters. You come on in here, and bring Caroline with you, and I’ll prove it to you.”

Reed said, “Only way I’m bringing Caroline anywhere near you is to trade her for Anton Bayard.”

Martin gave a short laugh. “Thing is, Ware, you may be having mental issues, but Dr. Cook—you remember him, he’s the psychiatrist the department had you talk to after the accident and he’s here right now, at headquarters, in fact—Dr. Cook doesn’t see you as a murderer, and I agree with him. You held me hostage, and a whole bunch of others, too, and not one of us is dead. I don’t see you killing Caroline. Worst you’re going to do is keep her somewhere until we find you. Which we will. So I don’t see that you have much leverage to make a deal. Why don’t you just come on in?”

Caroline grimaced. Her father had zeroed in on the same thing she had: the issue of Reed’s credibility as a dangerous kidnapper-turned-potential-murderer. If Reed hadn’t killed any-one yet, what were the chances that he was going to start with her?

Reed said silkily, “You’re right, I’m not a murderer. But then, I don’t have to be. All I have to do is tell Caroline everything I know. Every little detail, Superintendent, just like I told it to you. What do you think about that?”

There was a short silence.

“You son of a bitch.” Martin’s volume dropped so that the words were barely audible, at least to Caroline, but the animosity in his voice iced the air. It told Caroline that Reed’s threat had surprised him, that it had teeth, that it was something her father feared. It also signified capitulation.

Plus, she realized, it made it plain that what Reed was referring to was something that her father really, truly wanted kept secret. About suspicious murders, Martin had said.

One more piece of the puzzle had just fallen into place.

“I’ll call you tomorrow—no, I guess that’d be tonight—at 8 p.m. on that phone you’re holding to make arrangements for the trade. In the meantime, you want to make sure Anton Bayard is just as fine and dandy when you pass him off to me as when you picked him up,” Reed said. “We understand each other, Superintendent?”

“Yes.” The single clipped syllable was like nothing Caroline had ever heard come out of her father’s mouth.

It made her throat tighten.

It signified that he was beaten. Martin Wallace was never beaten.

“Good,” Reed replied, and clicked off.

Caroline had been listening so intently that when he stopped without warning she almost walked into his broad back.

“Hell,” he said. “Looks like we’re going to get wet.”

As she edged closer than she would have liked to a trailing vine in order to stand beside him, she saw that he was staring out at the oil-black waters of an inlet sliding past only a few dozen yards away. It wasn’t wide: maybe twenty feet. His hand held hers firmly, but she got the impression that at the moment he could have been gripping anything: the fact that it was her hand was incidental. His chiseled face was hard and set, and he appeared to be preoccupied with his thoughts. Just beyond where they stood the trees thinned out, and dense thickets of needlegrass clogged the marshy bank that led out to the water. A few stray beams of moonlight streaked through the canopy, gleaming darkly on fat drops of rain that had just begun to fall. Their ominous
plop-plop
warned of a downpour to come.

Before she could reply he glanced at her and added, “So. How much of that did you overhear?”

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

W
HAT WAS THE SAYING
? You can’t go home again? Now that he was pretty much over reeling from the shock-and-awe onslaught of the past forty-eight hours, Reed was acquiring a bleak acceptance of the fact that it was true: his house, his job, most everyone he’d known, and everything he’d worked for his entire life were lost to him. Getting himself and Holly and Ant out of this alive was looking like the best he could hope for, and even that was a long shot.

The only way he was ever going home again was to prove that his suspicions were correct about the involvement of members of the NOPD in the murders of the four victims in the cemetery (those four would be enough, he judged; proving police involvement in the murders of Magnolia and the others would be gravy, but not essential to getting his life back), and that his actions in taking hostages at the Winfield mansion and in kidnapping Caroline were justified.

He had to stay alive long enough to do that. He had to figure out which cops were involved and thus actively wanted him dead in order to silence him, and which were merely out to kill him because they genuinely thought that he was now a dangerous criminal run amok. Then he had to be able to prove to the satisfaction of a judge or a prosecutor or a grand jury or a cabal of honest cops, depending on the scenario, that the results of his investigation were in fact accurate.

Yeah, and learning to leap tall buildings with a single bound would be a nice trick, too.

But because that seemed like the only path that did not involve him either dying or spending the rest of his life as a fugitive, he was going to try, to see what he could do, with the understanding that if things got too dicey he could cut and run at any time as long as he got Holly and Ant out along with him.

Caroline was a problem. The sweet seventeen-year-old that he remembered had turned into a beautiful, smart, resilient wiseass, and he flat-out liked her. She was also sexy as all hell. Kissing her had been a total error, an impulse of the moment that had been too urgent and unexpected to resist, and the best thing he could do for both of them was put it out of his mind. Unfortunately, that was way easier resolved than done: thoughts of taking her to bed were staking out an ever enlarging territory in the back of his mind.

But he wasn’t going to do it. At this point, Caroline could still go home. Her life was still there waiting for her. She hadn’t tripped and fallen down the rabbit hole like he had, and for her sake he was going to do his best to keep it that way. Add to that the fact that she was a cop, the damned superintendent’s daughter to boot, with all kinds of loyalties and allegiances that he had no way of knowing about or understanding but that might ultimately come back to bite him, and that he had
kidnapped
her, for God’s sake, and he would be a fool if he wasn’t still having some trust issues where she was concerned.

And never mind the fact that every time he looked into her eyes he could see just how sexually aware of him she was.

Okay,
sex was the last thing he needed to be thinking about right now. To have any chance at all of pulling this off, he needed to keep a clear head.

So he was putting bedding Caroline out of his mind, chalking it up as something to be followed up on later, maybe, as a lagniappe, a little special reward he would allow himself to explore if he could fix this, if he got his life back, if they had a chance for anything beyond a one-night stand. Which was a whole lot of “if.” In the meantime, he was mentally consigning her strictly to the purpose he’d acquired her for: saving Ant.

It didn’t help that thanks to their clasped hands, she was walking so close beside him that he kept feeling the soft curve of her right breast brushing up against his arm with every step she took.

“I damn well heard what my father said. Don’t tell me I misunderstood!” Caroline was practically yelling in his ear to be heard over the roar of the rain, which in the last few minutes had really started coming down, rattling its way through the canopy, rushing like a waterfall through the spots where the leaves were thin, splattering over them both in a cool, not entirely unwelcome shower. She sounded pissed—probably because she was. Reed would have been worried about the volume of her voice, except the only other living creatures likely to be found in this remote part of the bayou tonight were not human.

He would have replied, but he didn’t see any point in it, because she wanted him to tell her about the “suspicious murders” she had heard the superintendent mention and he wasn’t going to do that, so they were at a stalemate. Anyway, to say anything at all that she could hear he would have had to yell, too, which he didn’t feel like doing at the moment, so he just shook his head at her and kept on walking. Her hand jerked in his grasp, which he interpreted as signifying extreme annoyance on her part, but he didn’t let go. Instead he tightened his grip on her fingers, which were slender and fine-boned like the rest of her, as well as being, at the moment, slippery wet. The unmistakably feminine feel of her hand in his, the connotation of wetness as he couldn’t help but apply it to her, immediately started to take his thoughts in a direction he didn’t want them to go. He deliberately redirected them down a more productive path, to rehashing the phone call with the superintendent, and considering where it now placed him in this whole mess.

The conversation with the superintendent had confirmed what he had suspected: he was being painted as a head case, a lunatic on a rampage. Although in hindsight he supposed he should have seen it coming, what he had
not
expected was to have his supposed breakdown blamed on the stress associated with the death of his kid and ex-wife. The frightening thing about it was that it made sense, made his apparently inexplicable meltdown understandable and thus easier for everyone to believe. A lot of cops had witnessed what a basket case he’d been at the joint funeral, so for them to accept that he’d now gone off the rails wouldn’t require that big of a stretch. Remembering the funeral brought a wave of pain with it. By now the feeling that his heart had gotten caught in a vise had become so damnably familiar that he knew how to deal with it, so he took a breath and forced all associated images and thoughts out of his mind as he counted backward from ten. Damn Martin Wallace for stirring up memories that he almost always nowadays succeeded in keeping securely at bay.

He was having more trouble than usual getting the picture of his little boy as he had looked lying in his small white coffin out of his head: he had to start the count again. Must be because he was bone tired. He was still wired, still running on adrenaline, but he could feel it starting to ebb. Once it was out of his system, he had a bad feeling that he was going to crash big time. Or maybe the unwanted image was hanging on because over the last few hours he’d been thinking way too much about the imminent possibility of his own death.